Is it the end of the world as we know it, or just a new phase in the battle for America’s soul?

I’ve had the same ten tabs open in Firefox this entire day. I feel like a madman, trying to create order out of the chaos in my mind. I’m convinced that there’s a thread tying together these articles, but I can’t figure out precisely what that thread is. Maybe it’s just that each is another indicator that we’re starting to slide very quickly down some slippery slope, and I don’t think that we’re in for a soft landing.

Here are the articles, which I present in the order the presented themselves to me as I read through my normal websites and my email today. If you can catch the elusive thread tying them together, please let me know.

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I admire Jack Cashill greatly. He’s a smart man and a superb investigator. Nevertheless, I’ve long thought he had something of a bee in his bonnet with his insistence that TWA Flight 800 was anything more than a tragic disaster. Now that I’ve had the dubious pleasure of watching the Obama administration work with the media to cover up events in Benghazi in order to salvage his reelection, however, I’m much more inclined to believe Cashill’s theory about the 1996 plane explosion — namely, that it was a terrorist attack, possibly of Iranian origination, and that Clinton and the media covered it up in order to secure his reelection.

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I know this sounds callous, but I think that the only way to save America is to let Obama take it off the cliff. Here’s my thinking regarding the “fiscal cliff” talks: The Republicans have three choices: (1) compromise; (2) stonewall; and (3) walk away. If they compromise, they’ve lost, as a smugly victorious Obama clearly is not in a compromising mood. He knows that, once the Republicans are a party to any economic plans, no matter how minimal or reluctant their participation, they will get the blame when things inevitably go wrong (or, in the unlikely event things go right, Obama will get all the credit). The Republicans will be irreparably smeared and become irrelevant.

If Republicans stonewall, the exact same thing will happen: the media will blame them for anything that goes wrong, and give Obama credit for anything that might stay right. And as this election showed, Americans listen to the media, despite knowing that it lies and conceals.

The only thing left for Republicans is to tell both Obama and the American voters, “The voters wanted Obama and his economic plans, so they shall get them. We wash our hands of this.” If things go well, then Republicans will have to accept that their policies are wrong. If things go badly — and I suspect that they will, and quickly too — Republicans will finally have a convincing platform from which to sell true fiscal conservativism, rather than once again being enablers for Progressive profligacy. That platform, I believe, is the only thing that can return America to her status as a light of freedom and constitutional prosperity.

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California health insurance rates are skyrocketing. The usual suspects are blaming the insurance companies for having the temerity to want to earn enough money to pay their employees, pay-out to their insureds, and have money for stockholders (who are, after all, the ultimate owners of these companies). You and I knew that this was inevitable under ObamaCare, since people no longer need to buy insurance when they’re healthy, but can wait until they’re sick. And we knew that the media would blame the insurance companies — just as we know that, if there’s a single Republican fingerprint on any budget plan, the Republicans will get the entire blame for any failures. Being a Progressive means never having to acknowledge that you’re culpable.

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Speaking of the appalling, biased media, the IDF provides a detailed glimpse into the way the media and the Palestinians work hand-in-hand to destroy Israel, both in the battlefield and in the war for hearts and minds around the world.

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It’s official: Harvard will have a student society dedicated to S & M (that’s “sadism and masochism” for the innocents among you). Please remind me why Harvard is still considered a respectable educational institution, worth the millions of dollars taxpayers that send to it, both by funding direct federal grants and by picking up the costs of all the taxpayer-guaranteed loans its students conveniently forget to pay upon graduation.

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Yes, Susan Rice is every bit as bad as you think she is — and it has nothing to do with her skin color and everything to do with her personality, political ideology, and ugly track record.

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One of my high school friends calls himself a life-long conservative, something I did not know about him back in high school. I think, though, that he could more accurately be summed up as a libertarian, since he is not at all a social conservative. To that end, he’s expressed dismay with the increasingly high profile of fervently religious candidates in the Republican party. He’s wondering if he can twist himself around to believe in the Democrat party, which he sees as non-religious. I countered his concerns by sending him Dennis Prager’s article explaining that socialism is not just a religion, it’s currently the world’s most dynamic religion. I recognize that the Republican party can be weak and pathetic, and that it is too often made up of RINOs or true ignoramuses who hide behind religion to excuse that ignorance. Nevertheless, my friend needs to understand that the alternative is worse.

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One of my long-time peeves (and one of the things that turned me to conservativism) is the way that Progressives mangled Title IX, which was, in relevant part, supposed to remove hurdles to women’s participation in college sports. Equality of access? It’s a good thing. What Progressives have done, though, is to demand perfect equality of numbers. Because college women have stubbornly refused to participate in college athletics at the same rate as college men, the only way to achieve this artificial parity is to slash men’s athletic programs. James Taranto explains here, and makes us fully aware of yet another travesty inflicted on America thanks to Progressive politics.

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And finally, it wasn’t your imagination that, for the first time in America, the 2012 election was openly predicated upon socialist class warfare. Just to make it official, a top Democrat political action group (conveniently working with George Soros funds) has started a website explicitly dedicated to class warfare.

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So, was I right? Is the common thread to these links the dissolution of America at every level?

I’m sorry if I sound bipolar. Yesterday I was enthusing about the possibility of an American Margaret Thatcher and today I’m talking about imminent Armageddon. The latter is how I feel; the former is how I want to feel.

In any event, I’m not sure one can ever fight a battle unless one simultaneously fears the opponent and feels optimistic about ones own abilities. In other words, success requires an honest assessment of the forces arrayed against you, as well as the belief that it is possible to prevail. Without that belief, why bother to fight?

I’m not real optimistic that we’re going to win this fight, but you can’t tell whether you’re doomed to lose if you don’t even bother entering the field of battle. The trick, I guess, is to throw yourself into the fray and hope for the best. The guys who defended Thermopylae certainly hoped for the best.

We have nothing left to lose. We have everything left to lose. Aux armes, citoyens!

Michael Adams

Formez vos battallions!

leigh

I am with you on the final thoughts. Hard to discuss and not sound like a doomsday freak, which is certainly to the advantage of any group hoping to fundamentally transform America. Be prepared to be isolated, belittled, and destroyed Alinsky style for the freak you must be! It seems there is a collaboration of sorts among the different groups wanting to take America down, but if they are successful together, their goals for this transformed America are not the same. Armageddon? I have come to believe the confusion comes when we think the current leader of the free world is operating with a concern about his legacy as a great American president. I just can’t figure out, when the goose is cooked, who he will be celebrating and sharing the meal with. I’m pretty sure any of us who believe in American exceptionalsm will not be at the table. Isn’t there a formula for chaos? Cloward Piven?

JKB

It is necessary to objectively assess your enemy. You must be brutal in your acceptance but still maintain you spirit. Right now, the Left is on a push. We’ve nothing to do but accept that many of the “pundits” on the Right want little more than their crumbs from the table. Oh, they write and churn but they seem unable or unwilling to offer a fair assessment of the opposing forces. They go on about the lack of conservatives in academia but only in hopes of getting a quota. They completely ignore the thing to do is not lament the universities but to usurp them.

On the other hand, we have our hopes. One is that absent continuing effort to suppress it, capitalism is the natural state. When the Soviet Union fell, the people organically embraced capitalism. True, some were unhappy but overnight the people went to finding ways to be of service to their fellow man in a mutually fair exchange. And yes, the cronies cornered some markets, but only with the help of the government, which always seeks to reward its cronies.

And look to online learning. We now have the tools to enable education bypassing the universities. True, they still control the “credentials” but the value of that can be swept away overnight. Again, they have the government imposing credential-requirements to shore up their monopoly but as we know, when real knowledge and skill matter in the endeavor, say in transforming the information age, the credential means little to the true movers.

Can we win, well all we have to do is disrupt their brilliant plan and the default is free enterprise. So, yes, we can win and not in a palms up military manner with reports broadwaved. No, we can win buy small timely disruptions that marinate until the brew bursts to bottle. They yell so loud because they know, in the quiet, in the peace, people go back to the organic, natural state.

SADIE

War of 1812 to the War of 2012 – “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” with the fiscal cliff. Reality is, we’ve already gone cliff-diving. Wouldn’t matter win, lose or draw support from the Republicans – it’ll be their fault… they’ve become the political equivalent of Israelis. Welcome to Gaza, D.C.

Ron19

A popular saying is that if you refuse to vote at all because you don’t like your party’s candidate, you are just giving another vote to the other party. The numbers in 2012 vs 2008 demonstrate this.

So why isn’t it the same thing with the fiscal cliff? If we say, “OK, you asked for it, go on over the fiscal cliff,” why isn’t that the same as condoning the other side’s policies and actions? Is that what everybody cheered about in the Bill Whittle speech we just saw?

I can’t say how MUCH I would enjoy casting my vote for this man in 2016.

Spartacus

“Is it the end of the world as we know it, or just a new phase in the battle for America’s soul?”
Must these necessarily be mutually exclusive options?

The United States is a political entity which has had an absolutely astounding and breathtakingly inspirational* run for several centuries; it is truly exceptional and absolutely without equal in world history. That being said, all good things must come to an end. All empires (and great, magnanimous, imperiophobic republics) ultimately decline and / or fall. This particular republic, however near and dear to our hearts, is infected with a wide variety of cancers, many of which have metastasized. The press, the entertainment world, the universities, primary education, the courts, election integrity, border integrity, monetary integrity, rule of law, civil liberties of dissidents, civil liberties of non-dissidents, the belief of the people in our founding principles, and too many other aspects of our society to name have been critically compromised; the failure of any one of these is potentially fatal to our republic, and they are all failing. We must be clear-eyed about the likely prognosis.

America, on the other hand, is the dream of liberty clothed in rule of law and implemented through a constitutional democratic republic, and this dream can never be extinguished. If Chinese idealists can dare to make a replica of statue in New York Harbor which they have never even seen and stand bravely beside it in front of rows of machine guns and tanks; if women(!) in an Arabic nation can step over the dead bodies of people who were gunned down while in front of them in the line to vote, and then dare to dip their fingers into ink to wear the Purple Badge of Courage; how much more then can we, who have tasted sweet freedom, remember what it was like, and rise to the occasion to take it back?

But the one thing we must not do is to allow the enemy to choose the battlefield and the rules of engagement by inertia or habit or default; that is fatal. And we will naturally tend to do that: “… all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” In the days immediately after the election, I confess that I wanted to gently and lovingly strangle any well-meaning soul who spoke hopefully about 2016. We could all name several hundred reasons why Mr. Obama should be laughed out of consideration for the position of dogcatcher, even in a dogless town, and the election results prove that our system is not just significantly broken, but satirically broken. That said, the future is wildly unpredictable, and maybe tossing out a candidate as a Plan B wouldn’t hurt — especially Allen West or Bill Whittle or someone similar — provided that we don’t place too much hope in it. There are several peaceful ways of evolving out of our present national form and back into a more federal one, as envisioned by the Founders.

And then there’s always the hybrid joker in the deck. If memory serves, Napoleon wooed and pursued Josephine, who in turn… tolerated him. Then, upon his return from Egypt and discovery of her infidelity, it was she who had to beg forgiveness from him in order to keep him, and the power relationship between them was forever reversed. I am certainly not nominating Napoleon as an example of moral behavior to be emulated, but suggesting that even should a union be saved, it can be done so in terms more favorable to one party if the threat of dissolution is credible.

* Yes, getting back to the etymological roots of things, the phrase “breathtakingly inspirational” is an oxymoron. Sorry.

The US has only ever had wars fought by citizens on our soil. We are known internationally as the only country that has never allowed a foreign army on our soil. Technically correct, although technically wrong too. Depends on when you start counting the US as a “country”. Socially, we became one nation after the US Civil War. And we will become either two + nations or become re unified as one nation (rather than what we currently are), after another civil war. Civil wars cannot be stopped. They will happen almost inevitably, as a society becomes old, decadent, fractured, or what not.

You can’t stop it. And those who have tried, using what they call “political agreements” with the Left and Democrats, didn’t do much in the end except make it more likely more people will die in the war.

Many people have said that we can’t fight a war against terrorism without recognizing the true Islamic nature of our enemies. Well they are right but also wrong. To recognize the true nature of our foreign enemies, first we must recognize when our family and the next door neighbors are full of murdering, sadistic, greedy corrupt rapists. When we can do that, then maybe we can worry about that guy killing children 5000 miles away.

But until we do that, we can’t do much about foreign enemies either, all in all. We don’t have our house in order.

The enemy was always yourself. When you cannot be defeated by others, the only one that can defeat you is yourself. That is the same for nations as for a warrior.

Ron19

Ymarsakar #10:

I guess internationals have never heard of our War of 1812, or the Aleutian Islands in WW II. Texans might also remember the Alamo.

Plus Iran ’79 or Benghazi ’12.

What have I missed?

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